| Memo
Re Bill in L.A.: Fault Not in Stars
By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 15, 2003; Page C01
The premise of "Shakespeare in Hollywood" is enchanting:
We're on a 1930s backlot, the visionary Austrian director Max Reinhardt
("Is true-- I am genius") is putting his stage version
of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" on celluloid, and two of
his stars, Victor Jory and Mickey Rooney, are AWOL. Quicker than
you can say "understudy," replacements materialize, two
performers so ideal that they arrive on the set knowing their parts
by heart.
That's because they are the parts. As if they had souls of their
own, the characters from "Midsummer," Oberon and Puck,
pop up through some cosmic coincidence. Here's the magic of La-La
Land taken to a whole new level. Shakespeare's spirits mingle with
Hollywood's, don sunglasses, chase skirts, fall in love and, as
in "Midsummer," get caught up in the affairs of mere mortals.
The notion, care of playwright Ken Ludwig, has lovely Pirandellian
possibilities. It's vaguely reminiscent of the great trick Woody
Allen pulled off in "The Purple Rose of Cairo," wherein
a fictional character escapes the silver screen and joins the real
world, only to discover that life in two dimensions was infinitely
easier. In "Shakespeare in Hollywood" Oberon and Puck
learn just the reverse --that real movie stars, authors of their
own self-aggrandizing fictions, are the ones who have it made. "They're
treated like gods," Oberon observes, and "they do nothing
to deserve it."
There are laughs to be mined in this setup, and the brassy, uneven
production at Arena Stage, directed by Kyle Donnelly, manages to
provoke a few here and there, thanks to the yeoman efforts of Casey
Biggs' Oberon and Emily Donahoe's Puck, among a few others.
But Ludwig's juicy windup only rarely results in a fat pitch across
the plate. Over the course of the evening, the gears of farce seem
to grind in the wrong direction. As the forced romantic pairings
become ever more bizarre, the wit grows thinner, the antics more
labored, the one-note characters more enervating.
The best jokes may be old jokes, but there's little attempt here
to give them a fresh varnish. In his Broadway farces "Lend
Me a Tenor" and "Moon Over Buffalo," Ludwig proved
himself to be a singularly devoted student of a dramatic form that
has seen better days. Even when the author is a master like Feydeau,
farce is a tough sell. Audiences don't have patience with less than
scrupulously staged assaults on their sense of surprise. Still,
ingenious ones do come along. Joe Orton ("What the Butler Saw")
contributed some subversive, sexualized work to the genre, and Michael
Frayn ("Noises Off") has the mad scientist's gift for
exquisite, maniacal plotting.
Ludwig's talent is a keen understanding of farce's undercarriage;
he's got the mechanics down pat. His comedies often feel like homages,
which is why he seemed to be a good candidate to try an adaptation
of "Twentieth Century," a version of the farcical Ben
Hecht-Charles MacArthur play, now at Signature Theatre. His dialogue,
however, is rarely as crisp as his stage directions; rife with plays-on-words
and the like, it frequently sounds dashed off, a little too easy,
better suited for a sitcom.
The comedic results are not so much disagreeable as uninspired,
which describes the shape that "Shakespeare in Hollywood"
is in. Ludwig receives little help from Donnelly, who in the past
has displayed a knack for comedy of a more poisonous nature; her
production of Clare Boothe Luce's "The Women" at Arena
several years ago had a tangy nasty streak. Here, though the pacing
is swift, Donnelly fails to give Ludwig's play an engaging look
or tone. Thomas Lynch's unbecoming set pieces don't dress up the
Fichandler much. And some actors, accomplished ones at that, are
offering outrageously mannered, look-at-me performances, the sort
that only set the production's problems in high relief.
Ludwig himself is offering a garden-variety take on old Hollywood,
the Tinseltown of cigar-chomping studio bosses, dumbbell blond starlets
and fussy gossips, the sort you always get in vintage comedy. His
innovation is the intermingling of the facts surrounding Reinhardt's
actual making of "Midsummer" with characters both real
and imagined. Thus Jack Warner (Rick Foucheux), Louella Parsons
(Ellen Karas), Jimmy Cagney (Adam Richman) and Reinhardt (Robert
Prosky) all play prominent roles in the farce, as does Will Hays
(Everett Quinton) of the notorious Hays Office, creator of the Motion
Picture Production Code, which censored the movies of the period.
Quinton, a longtime protege of the late Charles Ludlam and a regular
in New York's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, boorishly overplays
Hays. It's as if he were in a commedia dell'arte troupe; he's a
fulminating bundle of tics and nerves so worked up that his ears
all but spew smoke. In a similar vein, the talented Alice Ripley
takes vulgarity to unfunny extremes, playing the platinum bimbo
Lydia Lansing as a cousin to Lina Lamont, the spoiled, screeching
silent-era star played by Jean Hagen in "Singin' in the Rain."
It feels old. (In a sure sign of how low the comedy sinks, Ripley's
Lydia has to squirm her way through a case of crotch itch.)
Some actors fare better. Prosky's Reinhardt is a marvelous example
of making the most of meager rations. Without much to do, he manages
to give a performance of dignified understatement. Foucheux's Warner,
a secondary role, is also on the money. Biggs brings classical
bearing and authority to his Oberon; some of the evening's nicest
moments consist of the actor's recitations of snippets from Shakespeare,
and his tentative courtship of a young actress, played by Maggie
Lacey, nicely suggests the budding conflict aroused by his human
feeling. Donahoe's Puck is also fine; of course, Puck would warm
to the glitz and glamour of Hollywood. The performance captures
all the lusty appeal that Rolex watches and Ferraris would have
for this magical material boy.
Still, the rewards in this collision of the fairy lands envisioned
by Shakespeare and built by Hollywood are no more than intermittent.
By the second act -- which is largely taken up with the ludicrous
pursuits by various characters magically smitten with a studio yes
man (Michael Skinner) and a film actor (Hugh Nees) in drag -- the
early potential has drained away. The hope when the lights go down
is for the unfolding of another midsummer's dream. By the end, alas,
it's much ado about nothing.
Shakespeare in Hollywood, by Ken Ludwig. Directed by Kyle Donnelly.
Set, Thomas Lynch; costumes, Jess Goldstein; lighting, Nancy Schertler;
sound, Susan R. White; choreographer, Karma Camp; fight choreographer,
Brad Waller. With Bethany Caputo, Scott Graham, Eric Jorgensen,
Robert McClure. Approximately two hours. Through Oct. 19 at Arena
Stage, 1101 Sixth St. SW. Call 202-488-3300 or visit www.arenastage.org.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company |
